This Blog

There are 100 million young people in the Middle East and North Africa. They are a force for change in a region at a crossroads. This blog is focused on ideas for tapping into this immense potential and meeting the aspirations for jobs, justice and dignity.

March 2018

The conflict in Yemen, raging since early 2015, has had a devastating impact on the country’s infrastructure. Saana, the largest city in Yemen with a population of almost 2 million people, is completely without public electricity. In fact, six out of the 10 cities surveyed in mid-2017 by the World Bank, as part of the Yemen Dynamic Damage and Needs Assessment Phase II (DNA), had zero access to public electricity, with the remaining four cities having only a few hours of electricity per day.

Our team at the MENA Youth Platform recently had a conversation about women-and youth-led entrepreneurship in the MENA region, and for which emerging trends to look for. One thing is very clear: the next revolution could look very different.

A few weeks ago, I hiked along a historic path through Arab ar-Rashayida -- a Bedouin village nestled in the central desert foothills of the West Bank – up to a steep cliff overlooking the Dead Sea (and beyond that the Jordan Valley).

After drinking sugary hot tea and taking in the nostalgic view, my tour guide Nidal and I were picked up by our hosts from the Khaima Abu Ismail to head back through the desert (by car) only to be greeted by truck loads of middle school-aged girls and boys.

Egypt is a market of more than 100 million people and full of opportunities for the trained entrepreneurial eye. Like many developing nations, Egypt seems to have a struggling job market, but many see this as a blessing in disguise. In a country where millions are looking for jobs, there are also millions who give up on the search and create their own opportunities. This might seem far-fetched, but the reality is that poor people in developing nations are extremely entrepreneurial – probably even more so than in developed countries. Professor Ha-Joon Chang captured this fact in his book, 23 Things They Don’t Tell You About Capitalism.

One of the best decisions in my life was to reject a job offer from a big corporation and embark on an entrepreneurial start-up journey. Indeed, the journey has been tough and there were, and still are, bumpy roads, but the rising entrepreneurial spirit across the country has been extremely uplifting. I have been in the Egyptian entrepreneurial ecosystem for the past few years and I consider myself well connected and quite informed about everything that has been happening. But I can say with confidence that what the country has been seeing in the past few years is very promising and inspires us to do more.

About a decade ago, we started a project to improve solid waste management for waste pickers like Ibrahim and the 840,000 people in the southern West Bank governorates of Bethlehem and Hebron. One of the project components included the closure of the Yatta dumpsite, where illegally dumped and burned household waste was reaching a very unsanitary and hazardous level.

But here came the challenge.

While the closure of the dumpsite would mean putting an end to a serious environmental and public health problem, it was terrible news for the waste pickers and their families. It meant that the livelihoods of those families would come to an end.